David graeber the utopia of rules on technology st

In fact, none of the villains in any of the three movies wants to rule the world. They don’t wish to have power over others, or to create new rules of any sort. Even their henchmen are temporary expedients—they always ultimately plan to kill them. Nolan’s villains are always anarchists. But they’re also always very peculiar anarchists, of a sort that seem to exist only in the filmmaker’s imagination: anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt. The Joker, the real hero of the second movie, makes all of this explicit: he’s basically the Id become philosopher. The Joker is nameless, he has no origin other than whatever he, on any particular occasion, whimsically invents; it’s not even clear what his powers are or where they came from. Yet he’s inexorably powerful. The Joker is a pure force of self-creation, a poem written by himself; and his only purpose in life appears to be an obsessive need to prove to others first, that everything is and can only be poetry—and second, that poetry is evil.

So here we are back to the central theme of the early superhero universes: a prolonged reflection on the dangers of the human imagination; how the reader’s own desire to immerse oneself in a world driven by artistic imperatives is living proof of why the imagination must always be carefully contained.

The result is a thrilling movie, with a villain both likeable—he’s just so obviously having fun with it—and genuinely frightening. Batman Begins was merely full of people talking about fear. The Dark Knight actually produced some. But even that movie began to fall flat the moment it touches on popular politics. The People make one lame attempt to intervene in the beginning of when copycat Batmen appear all over the city, inspired by the Dark Knight’s example. Of course they all die horribly and that’s the end of that. From then on, they’re put back in their place, as Audience, who like the mob in the Roman amphitheater exist only to judge the protagonists’ performance: thumbs-up for Batman, thumbs-down for Batman, thumbs-up for the crusading DA … The end, when Bruce and Commissioner Gordon settle on the plan to scapegoat Batman and create a false myth around the martyrdom of Harvey Dent, is nothing short of a confession that politics is identical to the art of fiction.

The Joker was right. To a degree. As always, redemption lies only in the fact that the violence, the deception, can be turned back upon itself.

They would have done well leave it that.

The problem with this vision of politics is that it simply isn’t true. Politics is not just the art of manipulating images, backed up by violence. It’s not really a duel between impresarios before an audience that will believe most anything if presented artfully enough.

No doubt it must seem that way to extraordinarily wealthy Hollywood film directors. But between the shooting of the first and second movies, history intervened quite decisively to point out just how wrong this vision is. The economy collapsed. Not because of the manipulations of some secret society of warrior monks, but because a bunch of financial managers who, living in Nolan’s bubble world, shared his assumptions about the endlessness of popular manipulability, turned out to be wrong. There was a mass popular response. It did not take the form of a frenetic search for messianic saviors, mixed with outbreaks of nihilist violence;172 increasingly, it took the form of a series of real popular movements, even revolutionary movements, toppling regimes in the Middle East and occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi, trying to create new forms of democracy.

Constituent power had reappeared, and in an imaginative, radical, and remarkably